Like its predecessor, this movie is in "found footage" format. Unlike its predecessor, Unfriended: Dark Web has no supernatural elements in it. It's not a revenge flick about a wronged ghost... this time.
Warning - minor spoilers to follow
I really want you to watch and enjoy this movie, so I'll be spoiling it as little as possible.The Premise
Mattias steals a laptop from an internet cafe and uses it to Skype chat his friends. The laptop turns out to have been the property of a hacker from the dark web... a hacker who earns money through kidnapping innocent girls and torturing them to death, and streaming the experience live for the amusement of the dark web audience.The Characters
Colin Woodell as Mattias O'Brien. Decent turnout. Did the whole nerd thing pretty well, though later on he tended to overact. His anguished declaration of love and displays of panic, for some reason, didn't grab me as much as they should have.Betty Gabriel plays Nari, Serena's wife. She portrayed both her decisiveness and civic-mindedness, and her firmness in the face of danger. The sheer gutsiness of the character was awesome, and even as she was killed, it looked like she put up a hell of a fight.
Nari's wife, Serena, is played by Rebecca Rittenhouse. This role was pretty meh and screamed cannon fodder. I didn't feel much for the character and the actress just did not have that much to work with beyond being a lesbian. Even the crying scene felt a bit draggy.
Andrew Lees as Damon, the Brit among the group. He's a calm reassuring presence with tech know-how. He's even shown using Skype chat from his company's datacenter!
Connor Del Rio is AJ the conspiracy theorist. He plays him with the right amount of goofiness and paranoia. I think the character is a cool dude to hang out with, if a bit ranty.
Stephanie Nogueras as Amaya DeSoto, Matty's girlfriend. What a babe. Didn't say a single word - literally; she plays a deaf character - during the whole movie, but somehow this movie at least partially revolved around her and her deafness. That doe-eyed innocence actually kept the tension up because I wanted her to survive the movie.
Savira Windyani as Lexx. Cute and spunky. Seemed to be the token Asian in the cast, because she didn't contribute anything other than to the body count.
Alexa Mansour as Erica Dunne, the first victim we see. She looks just the part of the victim too - girl-next-door, pretty ordinary, thrown into a world of sadistic nihilism.
Douglas Tait makes an appearance as Charon IV. This guy is probably the most famous of them all, and the low budget probably contributed to his very limited scenes. The low resolution and all made his scenes look like some kind of video acting for a computer game.
The Mood
Starts off light-heartedly, with a lot of camaraderie interspersed with boyfriend-girlfriend drama. Gets grim in the middle of it, when it's revealed who the real owner of the laptop was, and what he was into. At the end, it's really sad and sinister all at once.Like the original, the action all takes place on a computer screen. Facebook, YouTube, Google and Wikipedia all make an appearance, along with many other apps.
What I liked
"covfefe" as a password. Nice way to tie this to the modern world.The music is bitchin'.
Nobody here is an unsympathetic character. No, not even that nutty conspiracy theorist. They're all, at the very least, mildly rootable for. This makes it easy to be invested in seeing at least one make it out alive. It's precisely because they're so innocent (unless you're one of those nuts who consider homosexual marriage a crime punishable by death) that makes their eventual deaths all the more horrifying.
The twist near the end, and at the end, is delicious. I'm not gonna spoil this one. You need to see it.
The way the hackers use live feeds (hacked from CCTV) is great for the movie. So while the protagonist is mostly stuck at his laptop, we still get to see stuff that's happening elsewhere.
The way AJ the conspiracy theorist dies is unintentionally hilarious. I really enjoyed it... for all the wrong reasons.
What I didn't
The glitches that come up whenever one of the villain hackers make an appearance. Like, what's up with that? It's not cool, it's distracting and makes no damn sense.The cast is too pretty. The gorgeous mute girlfriend aside, everyone else has these great cheekbones and perfect teeth. Even the Brit dude looks like Chris Hemsworth and has that sexy Londoner accent to boot. Damn, I hate them already.
Racial demographics. I can accept a predominantly white cast. But they seemed to have included a black actress and an Asian actress just for the sake of having them. Why? Just make them all white, or make more than one of them black, or something. Why does every horror flick seem to follow the same damn formula for racial representation?
It's too unbelievably convenient the way these dark web hackers appear to have figured out every move they'd make. Really?
Conclusion
Mostly enjoyable and didn't feel too shabby even when compared to Unfriended. Kept things fresh enough that the whole take on the "found footage" genre concept that made Unfriended such a hit, doesn't feel rehashed. As a sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web is not too bad at all. This is a movie that will make you feel apprehensive about staring at your computer screen too long.In my review of Unfriended back in 2015, I remarked that "any follow-up clones would serve only to lessen the impact of the original". In a way, it was true - the freshness is gone as far as concept goes... but the storyline is new and refreshing.
My Rating
7.5 / 10
Die-die must see!
T___T
T___T
No comments:
Post a Comment